Epilogue

It is later than that now, a Saturday, the middle of the day, and Frank is home. He and Maddie both, in fact, are in their bedroom on a Saturday afternoon. They had managed an excuse (what was it?) and the boys are satisfied and playing happily, for now, in the room below them. Maddie can hear their voices: Jake helping Garrett with something, and Garrett, loving the attention of his older brother, chattering happily, his voice coming to her like the chirp of a bird.

They’d had to be clandestine and quick: stolen moments like these in the middle of the day are risky at best, but she and Frank have discovered they love the risk. They think it’s even a little bit funny, and they both are so often tired at the end of the day that the risk of an afternoon is more than worthwhile.

So it was quick but also richly satisfying, and Maddie now turns to watch Frank sleep, to watch his chest fall and see the sun make the skin of his shoulder almost incandescent. She imagines she can see the individual cells, each of them refracting the light. Frank is naked; they are both naked, and the sheet covers Frank haphazardly. His left leg hangs over the edge of the bed, exposed. Maddie’s own body is marked with new scars and old, but she lets the sheet fall where it will, and her bare arm lies next to Frank’s. In his sound sleep, he is holding her hand.

The voices downstairs begin to rise. An argument. Any moment one of them will knock on the door, seeking arbitration. But Maddie doesn’t move just yet. Frank is sleeping soundly and he is holding her hand.

Then she hears Eli shush his brothers and his voice, measured, comes in tones too low for her to decipher words. Ah, she thinks to herself. They are working it out. She feels a rush of gratitude and closes her eyes. Maybe she can get a little nap.

She is doing so well, everyone says. Despite the new diagnosis, they say, you are doing so well. And Maddie smiles, thanks them, agrees.

What is cancer, anyway? she might ask, if the conversation went that way. What is cancer in the scheme of things? A paper cut, maybe? She smiles to think of Vincent struggling for words to name his faith. He’d had remarkable vision for a boy of seventeen, a boy who had known suffering in ways she—never abandoned by her father, for instance—couldn’t have understood. She had never understood Vincent; she hadn’t really tried.

A paper cut, he had said, and she had been angry. Now she wonders what he had seen as he gazed across the parking lot that day, what vision of sacrifice and eternity had cast itself there, imbuing all hurt and loss with far greater significance than she had cared to see.

Again she sees the tilted parking lot, the crack-scarred macadam, the thin sheets of rainwater sliding toward the drain. She imagines herself walking toward him—she at thirty-nine years old—climbing the gentle slope of pavement and water to his teenage self. She doubts she would have much to teach him, even now, but who couldn’t stand to be reminded of gentleness? She would like to tell him: let’s not call it a paper cut, Vincent.

And then she realizes that he probably didn’t even need that from her. Baby Dominic had probably taught him as much. Not that she could be certain: she didn’t know Vincent after Dominic.

She didn’t know Vincent after he was eighteen.

Eyes still closed, she sees his house: yellow brick with peeling paint around the windows. A wooden front porch, the boards split under their several coats of paint, curling downward at the top of the steps. The wooden steps themselves, cracked and softened; the bottom step gone altogether, replaced by a cinder block. The leaning plumb tree, lawn of crabgrass.

She had ridden past his house on the trolley dozens of times before she knew him, and now she wondered who else lived along that route, what other lives she had spied on, imagined, diminished while riding that electric vein into the city. Susan Sweet, perhaps. Maybe the Gilleces?

She saw Susan, Mr. Taylor, the Tedescos continuing on—as she heard they’d done—without the miraculous healings they had so boldly asked for. And yet they were content, persistent in faith despite God’s answer to their requests.

Maybe they already had what they really wanted. “Everybody just wants God.”

The sun falls through the window and warms her skin between the networked shadow of the birch. Half-dreaming, she sees an aerial view of her hometown, the grid of trolley lines and roadways, the branching streets and intersections, the lawns and green spaces, and the grit and dirt, the broken glass and waste of city life. The rise and fall of the city’s wrinkled skirts, Mount Washington, the glint of the rivers. The city. And at night, the limitless breadth of stars.

All of it of a piece. The realization coming softly, like sleep, heavy and sweet. Roadways like arteries, like veins, the landscape of a body, torn and torn and torn again into this small plot and that, this life and that. And all fed by the bleeding heart of the city: beautiful, terrifying, enough.